News

Public Invention has received a $20,000 grant from Protocol Labs to build the VentMon, a tester/monitor for rapidly manufactured pandemic ventilators. The pandemic demands a simple device that can be plugged into an airway to test a ventilator. In the developing world, many ventilators are broken and need to be repaired; part of the repairing …

I’ve written this topical piece on the current state of things as I see them in the effort to make open source ventilators. https://medium.com/@RobertLeeRead/the-state-of-open-source-ventilator-projects-as-of-march-21st-1f36bfb608b4

In just the last two weeks, America has begun to take strenuous action to slow the COVID-19 pandemic. Adam made a private call for us to answer this challenge, and Bruce Fenton (unknown to me) made a public call. Since Monday I have been working full-time (and a bit more) on this. Having the advantage of …

LibrePlanet2020 is a leading conference on ethical software; it has been virtualized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it is totally free! You can watch here: https://libreplanet.org/2020/live/ . Public Invention is going to be speaking at 4:20 on Sunday, (Eastern time). We will be presenting these slides: slides, check them out.

Science is about truth; engineering is about compromise. At Public Invention, we do both, but perhaps more engineering than science. Our goal is to have a large positive impact on many people; but time and money are always in short supply. How, then, to compromise on which projects to prioritize? In order to be able …

A hexagonal-centered toroidal 1.053-bounded regular tetrahedral simplex chain, discovered at the Mathathon by Nathan Gilbert. Two weekends ago, something rare happened. Thirteen people, sharing only a common interest in math, joined together from India, the Middle-East, England, Canada and the United States to solve real math problems. As might be expected, most of them dropped …